ABSTRACT
Urban environmental quality is an abstract, dynamic, and multifaceted concept comprising human and natural factors operating at different spatial scales. To capture the continuous variability of the urban environment over whole cities, satellite sensor images are the only suitable data source. However, until recently, satellite sensors were unable to capture data detailed enough to represent the fragmented land cover of urban areas. Indeed, a comparative study of environmental
quality in Hong Kong (Fung and Siu, 2001) used medium resolution SPOT images to estimate green space at the generalized level of tertiary planning units. A similar scale study to assess the quality of life in Athens, Georgia (Lo and Faber, 1997), used the NDVI to estimate greenness and temperature from Landsat TM images at 30-and 60-m resolution, respectively, and data were averaged at the census district level.
